Comments

Heckk, the lax policy on e-mail was one of my favourite things about reddit.
Now it's dead, just like the poor, defenseless canary.
reddit's gone to new levels of shit, it's sad. ;~:
Thank god (/u/emma) we have raddle, seriously!

I personally think the email thing is common sense. If you want to be able to block abusive people, you need to make it more difficult for them to just re-register a new nick every time you ban them. Eventually they will go away if you make them jump through enough hoops... Not really a bad idea in my opinion.

Also they can't so much be blamed for the warrant canary. If you are based in the US and you get served, you don't have much of a choice. At least they have some way of being honest with you about it unlike Facebook or Twitter.

I think what makes reddit suck more than anything is the users and the admins are just kind of abusive and shitty people with terrible political inclinations since Aaron Schwartz left. I don't know anything about the current admins except that they let too much hate speech take place on that site and if I were running it I'd be getting heavy handed with the ban hammer.

Reddit enforced email in order to make it harder to create alt accounts. Probably it's to stop vote brigading, but maybe also to track users better.

Either way, it's really easy to sidestep. Just use a service like 10minutemail that makes a fake email and you're golden. Honestly this is not a major cause for concern for the freedom of the Internet.